Client: City of Philadelphia Office of Immigrant Affairs (OIA) Category: Information design Skills: Survey design, Workshop facilitation, Content strategy, User Experience (UX) Copyrighting, Expert interviews, Participatory design Credit: Office of Open Data and Digital Transformation (ODDT)

What happens when you need help, but don’t speak or understand the language where you are? It could be for something fairly simple, like help renewing your driver’s license. Or it could be for something more serious, like understanding important medical information in an emergency.

Philadelphia is home to more than 390,000 foreign-born residents and U.S. natives with immigrant parents, who speak dozens of different languages other than English (Pew Trust). Like any other Philadelphian, the Low English Proficiency (LEP) people rely on the city for various resources and services. Onyx Valley Studios worked with the OIA to revise the tools, specifically the Language Grievance Form, created to help this group get the access they are due.

Outcomes

1. Community advocate workshop: Students enlisted LEP advocates, who work with various immigrant resource programs, to collect their stories and feedback on the current Language Grievance Form

2. Form redesign iterations: Using the feedback from the community advocates and applying best practices for form design, students developed new versions of the form.

3. Process improvement plan: Students developed a protocol for accessing, collecting, and responding to requests.

4. Community introduction: Along with the City of Philadelphia’s Office of Open Data, students presented the redesigned experience at event open to the public.